Rebottling premium wine into "glass" sized botles

Hi all, new to the forum.

Would appreciate your views on how one would go about rebottling a good bottle of wine into smaller (say 125ml) bottles.

Let's say it was a bottle of Penfolds Grange, as an extreme example.

I assume preventing contact with air when you open the original bottle and transfer it to the receiving bottles will be key. Also sterilisation of the receiving bottles I assume would be imporant.

The smaller bottles would be opened and consumed in a month or two.

Any views from the pros would be greatly appreciated.

I am planning on giving this a whirl and then getting a couple of noses to blind test the results to see if they can taste the difference between the smaller bottles and the original.

Feel free to tell me I'm smoking dope for attempting this.

Thanks heaps

It's like a recorking process. Siphon to the little bottles, minimize air contact, do not splash rack and add a pinch of meta before recorking. Clean and sterilized bottles a must.

There should be a discernible difference between the original bottle and the smaller bottles. What you are doing is akin to decanting a bottle of wine. The wine will become somewhat aerated, since you are opening it up to the air.

When a person makes a mistake with a freshly bottled wine, they may open the bottles and place the wine back into a carboy for further processing. But that is with a very new wine. What you are considering is with an already aged (expensive!) wine.

My opinion is that the wine in the new bottles will not last very long. With its exposure to air, it will start and continue the opening up process. It should be OK for a month or two, but not much longer.

Just my opinion. However, if you do go through with this experiment, I am sure many of us wil be VERY interested in the outcome, so please, keep us informed.

Pros: I can't even imagine one pro for doing this.

Cons: Wrecking a good wine.

Thanks for your thoughts. I guess it answers part of my question - it doesn't seem like there is an established way of doing this

robie said:

There should be a discernible difference between the original bottle and the smaller bottles. What you are doing is akin to decanting a bottle of wine. The wine will become somewhat aerated, since you are opening it up to the air.

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I understand if you aerate the wine it will start the opening up process and won't last very long. What I'm picturing is a process along the following lines to avoid just that:

1. Put original bottle and say 5 sterilised smaller bottles in a vacuum chamber
2. Pour or siphon the wine into the smaller bottles [I'm assuming I can solve problem of handling the bottles in the chamber]
3. Take small bottles out of the chamber
4. Top up with say CO2 or N2
5. Screw cap on (or cork, though gut tells me screw cap would work better)

Steps 1 and 2 above seem a bit convoluted (I know I know, the whole exercise is convoluted). Perhaps the way to do it without a vacuum chamber would be:

1. Open the original bottle
2. Fit a hermetic rubber cap with a hose sticking out (sterilised and perhaps blasted with a bit of CO2)
3. Fill recipient bottles with CO2
4. Siphon wine into recipient bottles
5. Screw caps on

I have no doubt this will fail the first few times but I'm willing to give it a few goes (maybe not with Grange!).

I am no wine bottling expert so if there is something glaringly obvious that I am missing your views would be much appreciated. And I'll be sure to report back!

Cheers

I think many of us have recorked our wines for various reasons. I have even opened up whole batches of kit wines that I was not happy with, dumped them all into a primary, added tannin, mixed it up, then rebottled right back into the same bottle it came out of 20 min earlier with out a single issue. And the wine was improved because of it. Just always use a new cork, you can't ever reuse an old cork.

I would try it with an inexpensive bottle of wine first if your not fluent in bottling. I see no show stoppers if this is something you really want to do. Make sure the bottles are clean and sanitized and you use a good cork and proper bottling equipment and things should be fine.

ibglowin said:

I would try it with an inexpensive bottle of wine first if your not fluent in bottling. I see no show stoppers if this is something you really want to do. Make sure the bottles are clean and sanitized and you use a good cork and proper bottling equipment and things should be fine.

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Awesome thanks, will give it a go, fingers xed

I thought of it a couple times, but just ended up getting a bigger glass so that I only get 2 glasses out of a bottle.

That clearly seems like the most practical solution!

Wondering of your success

I was wondering how the OP made out with this experiment.

I was looking at doing this with Port Wines. We love port wine but as an after dinner drink opening an expensive bottle of port isn't smart. If you can't finish the bottle off in a couple of days, it's not good. We might want port 2-3 times a week so for now we don't often buy port unless we know we are having friends over. Rebottling the port into 12 oz or 8 oz bottles would be a great solution if it works. Like the OP, we'd only need it to stay good for a few weeks tops.

Tiller said:

I was wondering how the OP made out with this experiment.

I was looking at doing this with Port Wines. We love port wine but as an after dinner drink opening an expensive bottle of port isn't smart. If you can't finish the bottle off in a couple of days, it's not good. We might want port 2-3 times a week so for now we don't often buy port unless we know we are having friends over. Rebottling the port into 12 oz or 8 oz bottles would be a great solution if it works. Like the OP, we'd only need it to stay good for a few weeks tops.

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No reason you can't do it, as the OP was told.
Refer to ibglowin's post above, good information.